If you are involved in any commercial activities around CEP, this cartoon should be pretty funny:



(I have no idea whether it's legal to post it here, but hopefully it's ok)

I am not going to explain here why most performance numbers and benchmarks should be treated with extreme suspicion. They typically do not fully specify what's being computed, what the incoming events look like, how they get into the engine, what processing options (guaranteed delivery, failover, etc.) are enabled, what exactly is being measured, and so on. This has already been explained in other places.

I'll just note that we get a fair number of customer inquires that look like this "Hello, could you, please, tell us 1) how much your engine costs? 2) how many messages it can process per second?" That's it! Without any explanation of what they want to do, what the application looks like, even what domain it is in. Nothing!

I wonder if they send such requests to multiple CEP vendors, and then cleverly divide the second number by the first, to establish a CEP "message/$" rating for each vendor?

Mark Tsimelzon
President & CTO, Coral8